Marvel girl

Atomic Romance has a couple of articles up (Men Are From Marvel, Women Are From DC, Not Really But...and DC's Super Feminine Mystique) about which of the big two comic companies has appealed more to women.

I'm a woman, and historically a Marvel fan primarily; I really started getting into comics as a kid in the late 60s and early 70s, which might have something to do with my preference. Back then, it seemed like DC and Marvel comics were as different from each other as they were from, say, Archie.

Characters like Superman seemed (as I think I've mentioned elsewhere) pretty well established as at least 30-something--but it wasn't the age, it was the attitude, which was somewhat parental (to put it nicely) or paternalistic (to put it not so nicely). In other words, mature in the 50s-sitcom-dad mold. Regardless of what cool stuff they were doing, you had the feeling that if they happened to rescue you, you'd be in for a stern lecture afterwards.

The Marvel heroes didn't necessarily seem younger (certainly I perceived Iron Man and Captain America as in their thirties) but they also seemed far less concerned with being flawless. (Even Cap, the Boy Scout's Boy Scout, was an enormous whiner back then.) They seemed more human, less conscious of being a "good role model." The Avengers fought like cats and dogs. The Justice League, on the whole, got along pretty well--Superman and Batman were best friends, goodness knows how they managed that!

So...way back in the dark (and by "dark" I of course mean "Silver") ages, Marvel, for me, had more interesting characters, more drama, less of a sense that someone was trying to put something in my comics that was "good" for me.

As a side note, I don't think either company was going to draw me in with its female characters in particular, because--despite picking up an occasional issue of Supergirl or Wonder Woman--there really weren't any that I'd have found all that interesting. Except for Saturn Girl of the Legion of Superheroes, who was easily the best thing in the book back then.

By the late 70s, I was in high school, and actually had a friend who liked comics. She was almost entirely an X-fan, and--this being the Claremont/Cockrum era--that was definitely the place to be if you were a girl comic fan who wanted to read about girl superheroes, because the X-Men had Storm and they had Phoenix. (I did read Legion of Superheroes, and New Teen Titans. I've always preferred team books on the whole.) Marvel also had Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel, and if DC had anything like that I really didn't know because, by then, I didn't look at that part of the rack at all.

But nowadays, I don't honestly see a lot of differences between the two companies, certainly not the massive ones of my youth. I have a deeper emotional connection to the Marvel characters, so in general I prefer them, but if I were starting to get into comics now, I can't think of anything that would sway me one way or the other.